It would be extremely useful for people who bill hourly to have a feature that times the amount of work put into a project.
It could function easily.

Time is incremented on a project whenever the project is opened. After xx amount of time with no keyboard input the timer start.
The project time would need to be able to be changed manually as well.

Andrew

Since I must be the only person interested in this I have a different question.
Is there a way to write addons for NuSphere? I would be more than happy to spend an hour or two and write this.

Andrew

I'm a developer too and would like to add some comments there
From my very own perspectives, it would make sense to focus more on what developers are doing then how much time they are spending.
You may get more information about level of work intensity if you analyze source control system. As a sample of criteria I'd propose size of diffs produced or number of bytes changed in a particular project by a particular developer in specified time frame. For example developer A submited many changes to ProjA, summary: 40kB diff from Feb27 to Feb28 and 80kB for ProjB for the same period.

Regarding the IDE... suppose timer is implemented. So you'd get for example ProjA was active for 3h and ProjB was active for 30minutes. What this numbers are telling? Nothing. It migher happen that developer was away from my computer and left the IDE or he was reading books or manals and nothing was actually developed at all.

Finally, it's a project management problem, not IDE's, and perfomance should be evaluated in terms "tasks per time frame" and tasks would be splitted at the lowest possible granularity (1-2 days each in a perfect world). I'd agree to add TODOs to the IDE and report time spent between an item was added and marked as done.